How to choose an RV park marketing agency

The core problem is that most agencies selling to parks sell the same package they sell to dentists and roofers. Some of that transfers. A good deal of it does not.

A park is seasonal, sells nights rather than appointments, competes across a region rather than a town, and lives or dies on reviews. An agency that has not thought about any of that will run a generic programme and report on generic numbers.

The twelve questions

1. What will this produce in the first ninety days? A specific answer, not a phase diagram. Vagueness here predicts vagueness later.
2. What do you measure? The answer should reach leads, calls or bookings. An agency that only reports rankings and traffic is reporting on its own activity.
3. Who owns the website when this ends? If the park cannot leave with its own site, it is renting.
4. Who owns the Google profile and the analytics? Same question, and parks lose these more often than websites.
5. What happens if we stop? Work that disappears at cancellation was never an asset.
6. Can we pause for the closed season? A twelve-month contract on a six-month park is a real cost. Some can, some cannot, and either is fine if stated.
7. Who actually does the work? Whether it is subcontracted is not disqualifying. Not being told is.
8. Have you worked with a park before? If not, what makes them think it transfers? An honest no with a good answer beats a vague yes.
9. What will you need from us each month? Every programme needs photographs, rates and answers. One that claims to need nothing is not going to produce much.
10. What would you fix first, and why that? This is the question that exposes whether they looked at the park at all.
11. What are you not going to do? An agency that claims to do everything well is describing a sales page, not a service.
12. What does the contract say about the review process? Anything involving filtering by expected sentiment is prohibited and should end the conversation.

Answers to walk away from

• A guaranteed position in the map results or on page one. Nobody controls that, and offering it is either ignorance or dishonesty.
• A quote before anybody looked at the park. Scope cannot be known without looking, so a price arriving first is a package rather than an assessment.
• Only positive reviews get requested. Prohibited, per the Google review policy, and it risks the profile.
• Keyword stuffing the business name on the Google listing. Against Google's rules, and listings get edited for it.
• A long contract with no exit, particularly at a seasonal business.
• Reporting that never mentions leads. Traffic that produces no bookings is not a result.
• Pressure to decide today. Nothing about a park's marketing is that urgent.

Two things that matter less than they seem

Agency size. A large agency has more people and more clients. A small one has fewer of both. Neither predicts whether a park gets attention, and the question that does is number nine.

Being local. Appealing, and largely irrelevant. A park competes for campers who live elsewhere, and the work is the same from anywhere. What matters is whether the agency understands parks, not whether it understands the town.

Where price fits

Last, after fit. A cheap programme that produces nothing is the most expensive option available, and the one parks buy most often.

The honest way to judge a monthly figure is against the value of an average stay and how many extra bookings would cover it. For most parks that number is smaller than expected. What moves the number is set out in what RV park marketing costs.

The alternative worth considering first

Not hiring anybody, at least initially.

Consider a park that has never asked guests for reviews, whose Google listing is half filled in, and whose phone goes unanswered after five. It has substantial gains available without an agency. Those are the first things any competent agency would do anyway.

That case is made in full in agency versus doing it yourself, including the point at which hiring stops being premature.